It's rare to read really good writing on the cross-currents that make dating so strange and irrational, but this post by Reihan Salam gets, I think, a whole lot right. I've long been an advocate of the position that the unrealistic expectations imposed by consumption of our heavily-romanticized culture are responsible for a fair chunk of the unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the world o' relationships, but I remain unwilling to follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion, that we should all settle in to the merely attainable.
But that isn't quite the recipe for long-term dissatisfaction that it seems. To enter Reihan's world, if average Jim did land unattainable Lucy, Lucy would now be, by dint of her relationship with Jim, attainable. Status is malleable, and gleaming objects of unrequited affection often lose their luster when the relationship becomes reciprocal. Even the world's most beautiful women and most chiseled men pick their noses.
Don't ask me how I know.
So it'd seem that the game is in status manipulation over the long haul. That, in fact, is a pretty succinct summation of the relationship advice industry's purpose. The infamous dating guide for women, The Rules (one of the coauthors of which just got divorced), attempted to instruct its devotees on appearing unattainable through rigidly constructed guidelines for returning calls, accepting dates, offering affection. And the burgeoning subculture of male pick-up teachers attempts to do the same in reverse, teaching indirect approaches, active disinterest, and the ostentatious rejection of neediness. To some degree, the trick here is fooling potential and actual mates as to your actual value, and continuing with the "deception" even after the relationship has solidified. But that's old news, just a fresh way of restating the warning to not get too comfortable, or let your mate do the same. Nevertheless, in a world where we're taught to seek transcendence, fooling each other into believing we've attained it seems a whole lot more attractive than communally agreeing to accept limits.
